You get to know who you really are in a crisis.

Or again we might say that we are at a Daniel-like moment, for Daniel and his three friends faced a challenge unlike that of most of the Jews before them. The world as the Jews had known it for hundreds of years from Joshua onward had gone. Not since the captivity in Egypt had Jews been strangers in a strange land as they found themselves when defeated and deported as exiles to Babylon in the sixth century B.C.

To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.

We say, sorrow, disaster, calamity. God says, chastening and it sounds sweet to him though it is a discord to our ears. Don't faint when you are rebuked, and don't despise the chastening of the Lord. In your patience possess your souls.

At times God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us to heed Him. Song birds are taught to sing in the dark, and we are put into the shadow of God's hand until we learn to hear Him.

When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted friendship - when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.

If we were never depressed we should not be alive; it is the nature of a crystal never to be depressed.

When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted desires, a broken friendship, or a new friendship— when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.

The things we try to avoid and fight against—tribulation, suffering, and persecution—are the very things that produce abundant joy in us. "We are more than conquerors through Him" "in all these things"; not in spite of them, but in the midst of them. A saint doesn't know the joy of the Lord in spite of tribulation, but because of it. Paul said, "I am exceedingly joyful in all our tribulation" (2 Corinthians 7:4).

Let circumstances take you where they will, but keep drawing on the grace of God in whatever condition you may find yourself.

Any problem that comes while I obey God (and there will be many), increases my overjoyed delight, because I know that my Father knows and cares, and I can watch and anticipate how He will unravel my problems.

It is not true to say that God wants to teach us something in our trials. Through every cloud He brings our way, He wants us to unlearn something.